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We've had three weeks now where the studio hits 32° by noon. I can't open the skylight without letting in the construction dust from the building next door, so I've been working with the door propped and a fan that just moves the hot air around. The cold wax medium behaves completely differently. It's soft before you even put it on the palette. The layers that should take three days to set are still tacky after a week. I had a piece I was building up, white over warm grey, and I went to scrape back and the whole top layer came off like butter. Ruined it. Or maybe it's a different painting now, I don't know yet. I've been mixing the wax a little stiffer to compensate but then it drags on the knife and I lose the gesture I want. There's no solution, really. You just adapt and the work becomes what the weather lets it be. What I actually mean is: I hate summer in the studio but I also kind of need it, because the winter work comes out too controlled and I don't realise that until July shows me what I was missing.

I scorched a whole stack of pieces this week. Not burned to ash, just pressed with the iron turned up too high because I was hurrying, and now that sheen is on the cloth and I can feel it every time I run my hand across. The pattern's still there. The color's still there. But the life went out of it, and I can't unfeel it. My grandmother would've made me rip it all out and start over. She had a rule about never rushing the pressing. I broke it and I know better. I keep going back and forth on whether to scrap them and cut new pieces, or leave it and let the mistake be part of the work. Honest to goodness I don't know which is the bigger lesson. Part of me says the dull spots are just the truth of that day, and part of me says no, honey, you knew better, the cloth will tell on you. Anybody else ever ruined something small in a way the eye can't catch but the hand knows? What did you do with it?

My studio is an old factory space and the heating is a joke, so there is a radiator in the corner that clicks and knocks in a rhythm I have come to know exactly. When it starts up around nine it means the custodian has switched the boiler on. When it goes quiet mid-afternoon, he has switched it off again. I never look at the clock anymore. I know where I am in the day by the radiator. Today it went quiet at fourteen-thirty and I thought, fine, I will keep working in the cold because I was at a place in a canvas I did not want to leave. Two hours later my hands were stiff and the paint was dragging wrong and I finally admitted the heating was not coming back. The custodian is on holiday, probably. Somebody told me this and I did not listen. I keep a thick wool jumper in the studio for exactly this. It has oil on the left sleeve from maybe three years ago, a smear of burnt sienna that will not wash out. I put it on and the canvas and I agreed on a different temperature. It is a strange thing how cold changes how oil behaves, the resistance of it, the drag. There is a kind of honesty to working like that. Then my wife called and asked why I sounded like I was talking through a scarf. The light went out of the day at four. I scraped the canvas down and left it to wait for tomorrow. Some days are like that, you build a layer and you take it off again and the day is not wasted because you learned the colour needed to come from somewhere else.

Been humidifying the same page for four days. Blotter, Gore-Tex, weights, the whole slow ritual. It comes out flat and soft, I set it under glass, and by evening it's cupped again at the corner like it's remembering where it was folded for eighty years. I know the answer. More time. Less heat. Patience I don't have this week. The annoying part is it's a beautiful page, a map of the Bohus coast with a hairline tear right through the water, and I want it for a piece, and instead I'm standing over a tray at 7pm spraying distilled water on something that has decided it prefers being wrong. Conservators keep telling me paper has a memory. Mine is holding a grudge.

There's this old bungalow on Nandi Durga Road, one of those Art Deco ones with the curved verandah and the beautiful terrible paint job, salmon pink over original white, peeling everywhere. I've sketched it maybe five times, painted it twice before, and both times it came out technically fine but completely dead. No life in it. Like a photograph but worse. Today I went back with just my travel kit, small palette, one brush, no pencil underdrawing. Sat on the compound wall for about 45 minutes in that late-morning heat that makes you regret every life choice. And something just… unlocked. I let the watercolour bleed into the sketchy ink lines. Didn't try to fix the wonky bits. Left the verandah half-raw. It's not my most accurate piece by a long shot but it's the first one that feels like the house, not like my anxiety about drawing the house properly. Anyway I'm still riding that high. Chai and Marie biscuits kind of celebration tonight. 🙏

She filmed me cleaning up a seam on a piece I'm finishing for a client, no talking, just the grinder and the sparks. Posted it against my wishes. It's had more views than everything else on the account combined, and eleven people asked what disc I was using. That's the part I didn't expect. The questions were all technical. Nobody asked what it meant. Somebody in Ohio wanted to know how I keep the heat from pulling the plate. I've spent thirty years thinking the work is the thing you show. Turns out the showing is the shop noise and the cheap gloves and the fact that I stop grinding before it's perfect, because past a certain point you're just making it thinner. I don't know what to do with that. I'm not going to start filming myself talking. But I've got a load of steel coming Tuesday and I'll probably set the phone on a bucket again.

I will start. A dealer once asked me to paint a specimen considerably larger than life, in a stronger red than the plant actually is, because "the wall needs heat." I declined and lost the show, and I would decline again, though I confess I thought about it for a week. So: what has a gallery or curator asked you to alter? Size, palette, framing, subject, a background that isn't there in nature. Did you hold your ground or give in, and how did it turn out either way? I'm genuinely interested in where people draw the line, and whether anyone has changed a piece and been glad they did.

Working on a small steel piece for a guy's garden, three eighths plate, nothing complicated. Last pass with the grinder, the wheel caught an edge and kicked, and I put a gouge across the face about two inches long. Right where the light hits. Spent ten minutes with a flap disc trying to blend it out. Made it worse. Then I stopped. I've been doing this over thirty years and the thing that took the longest to learn is that the mark usually stays. You chase it, you take more off than you meant to, you end up with a soft patch that reads as a mistake from across the yard. So I heated it and worked the gouge into the texture instead. Now it's just part of the surface. Delivered it this morning. He didn't notice. Nobody ever does. Took me until my fifties to stop fighting the piece. Still forget sometimes.

I've been going back to the studio after dinner lately, when the building is empty and the heating clicks off and it's just me and the overheads. There's no good reason for it. I have normal daytime hours like anyone else. But something happens around eleven that doesn't happen at three in the afternoon, the paintings stop performing for me. They just sit there and I sit there and whatever is actually wrong with them becomes obvious. Last night I scraped back a whole corner I'd been building up for two weeks. Big silver-grey mass I was attached to. Gone in twenty minutes. And I could see immediately: it had been dead weight the whole time. The painting breathed again. I don't know why it takes the middle of the night to see that. Maybe because there's nobody to show it to later.

The dry air from the heating has my hands in this state where I keep catching on the surface of thin Japanese paper. Tiny little tears where I just want a clean edge. I've tried lotion, I've tried washing less, nothing fixes it except waiting for the humidity to come back. So today I'm just handling cheap scrap paper instead and letting the good stuff sit. A whole day of making do because of dry hands. Smallest thing in the world but it's the kind of thing that decides how a day goes.

People ask how I start. I don't start. I turn the gas on and strike the striker, and by the time the flame's settled I'm already moving. Standing in the shop deciding what to do next is the fastest way to lose an hour. The heat makes the decision for me. Same with the grinder. I've got a 4 inch cup wheel on an old Metabo that's older than my son. Cord's been taped twice. I put it on a piece I'm not even sure about and the noise kills every other thought in my head. That's the point of it, honestly. I'm not saying it's a philosophy. It's just that I'm 61 and I've learned I can't think my way into a sculpture. I have to be making a mess first and then the thing tells me what it wants. The other half of it: knowing when to set the tool down. Most of what I ruin, I ruin in the last twenty minutes of a good day.

Not the weld. The plate. I cut a 14 inch square of 3/16 for a base, sat it on the bench, and it rocked. Ran a straightedge across it and there's a belly in the middle maybe an eighth. It was flat when I bought it, or flat enough that I didn't check, which is the part I'm annoyed about. Twenty years ago I'd have tacked it to a strongback before cutting and not thought twice. Today I got in a hurry. Two options. Heat it and shrink the belly out, which is fussy and I've never been great at it, or cut another one and clamp it down this time. I'll probably do the second one and keep the first as a shim under the bench for the next ten years, which is what happens to half the steel in this shop. The metal doesn't care how long you've been doing this.

Not on purpose. I left the little glass dish there Saturday after cleaning brushes, forgot it, and found it Monday soft as butter, almost dripping off the palette knife. Ground it warm and it went onto the canvas differently than the tube ever does. Covers three times faster, and the transparency, voilà, that's the thing I've been chasing for a month on this drapery and couldn't get with medium. So now I'm warming pigment on a radiator like an idiot. I have a small ceramic bowl, I put the lumps in it in the morning, and by two o'clock it's workable. The tube stuff seems dead to me this week. I keep a thermometer near the window because the studio drops to 15 in the morning and I want to know when I've crossed into the good range. Downside: I left one batch too long Thursday, came back and it had skinned. Forty grams gone. My daughter asked why the studio smells like a bakery and honestly I don't know what to tell her. Somebody here must grind their own with a muller. Do you warm the slab or just accept it cold? I'm half a step from buying a heating pad for this and I'd rather hear I'm not the only one before I do.

Had a commission for a welded steel gate, half inch plate and square stock, plasma cut, powder coat. Quoted 4200. Client asked for a breakdown. Against my better judgment I gave them one. Right there in the middle was a 40 dollar cutting disc. I wrote it down because I always write down consumables. They saw the 40 and the whole 4200 stopped making sense to them. I explained the disc is 40. Knowing where to put the cut, and doing it in one pass so the plate doesn't heat and warp, is the rest. They said they'd think about it. That was six weeks ago. I've been at this 30 odd years and I still hand people the rope. Next time the answer is the number. Not the math behind it.

The canvas has been leaning against the wall since Tuesday and I keep walking past it, which is its own kind of work I suppose. It is 2.2 metres by 1.8 and the top third is wrong in a way I cannot name yet, only feel, like a sentence with the verb in the wrong place. So I stand there with the palette knife and do nothing, and it is very cold in the studio because I refuse to put the heat on until November on principle, and my hands are the temperature of the turpentine. In the middle of this my phone rings. A gallery in Munich. Not a bad gallery. Wants to know whether the big pieces will be ready for a spring show, wants a number, wants a date, wants a title, and I am standing in front of a thing that has no title and no third of its surface and I hear myself say yes, of course, spring is fine. Then I put the phone down and look at the wet grey wall of it and think, well. Now it is true. Now I have promised it. That is the part nobody warns you about when you are twenty-three and romantic about the seriousness of the studio life. The deadline is not the enemy of the painting. The deadline is the only reason it will ever be finished, and I hate that and I know it and I still stand here doing nothing with cold hands, and the wrong third is slowly becoming the thing the whole picture is about. Naja.

ngl the most important thing in my studio right now costs six dollars and it's a plastic clip fan from the corner store three blocks down. the little ones that clamp onto anything. i clipped it to the easel arm because the acrylic started tacking way too fast once the heat came in, and now i basically paint at the speed the fan lets me. i've learned more about my own timing from a cheap fan than from most of art school. the tradeoff is it's loud enough that i have to pick between the fan and music. today i picked the fan. which means i painted the whole afternoon in this weird white-noise hum like the inside of a seashell and honestly? my hand was steadier. the painting i'm working on is four feet of flat orange and one dumb white shape and it's fighting me on the value, everything else is cooperating just to lull me into a false sense of security about the orange. anyway if you've got a cheap tool that accidentally became load-bearing for how you work i want to hear it

Not a metaphor. It is gone. Small one, the thin trowel shape, worn down on one side from fifteen years of scraping. I have turned the studio over twice, checked the jar of linseed, the freezer, the pockets of the coat I only wear when the heating dies. Nothing. What bothers me is not the knife, I can buy another for nine euros. It is that I cannot remember the last time I held it. I remember holding it on the Corot copy two weeks ago, that grey passage in the drapery, and after that, blank. So somewhere in my own studio I put down a tool I have used nearly every day of my working life and simply stopped seeing it. That is the part I do not like. Not the loss, the not noticing. My daughter says this is what happens when you turn forty-four, very funny, she is sixteen and thinks the whole thing is a comedy. My husband suggested I had perhaps already looked for it, which is the kind of sentence that ends a marriage in theory. I have now ordered a replacement, which of course means the original will present itself tomorrow on the windowsill like nothing happened. Always the way. Meanwhile there is a half-finished interior on the easel with a knife-painted edge on the tablecloth that I cannot finish until I find it or admit defeat, and I have been standing in front of it for two days doing neither.

Mine was pure nerve. I carried a portfolio of urban sketches into this small gallery near MG Road, fully expecting to be told they don't take walk-ins. The owner's assistant said they were busy, and I almost left, but I'd come all that way in the heat so I just stood there awkwardly until someone finally looked at my stuff. She flipped through maybe four pages and said "bring these back properly framed." That was it. No contract, no email, just that sentence. I got paid in the end, eventually, after chasing. But that one sentence changed everything for me. How did yours happen? Did you cold-walk like me, or did they spot your work online first? I'm genuinely curious which path actually gets you in the door these days.

Been hauling materials from the same supply place in Kalamaria for years, and yesterday some vendor who knows my face comes sprinting out of his stall all eager. Says he'll help me carry the palette of smalti I just paid for. Sir, that is 40 kilos of glass and you are wearing sandals. I told him no thanks, I've got it, I've done this a thousand times. He does not stop. He grabs one corner anyway. Fifteen seconds later he's on the pavement holding his wrist like I shot him, and I'm standing there with the whole weight on one side because he let go mid-lift. My back is going to remind me of his good intentions for a week. The thing is he meant well. That's the part that gets me. Nobody ever busted their wrist offering to carry my groceries, but touch a piece of heavy art material and suddenly everyone's a hero. I thanked him through the pain, paid for the palette again in the form of a chiropractor visit today, and now my studio smells like deep heat. I know it's not the worst thing that happened in the world today. But my knees are 45 years old and they did not need this.

The studio got so cold this week my coffee went cold before I drank it. Twice. I stood there holding a lukewarm cup looking at a piece that's been waiting on the right bit of metal for a month and thought maybe the heating bill is the real reason this installation exists, it's the most consistent collaborator I have. I finally said fine and rigged a second heater out of an old reflector I found in the trash behind the theatre. Doubles as a light. Now half the room is warm and blinding and the other half is freezing and dark, which honestly is the most honest description of making anything I've ever come up with. The piece I was waiting on? I found what I needed in my own scrap pile the moment I stopped looking for it. Of course. Every time.